On November 16, 1940, the Jewish quarter in Warsaw was surrounded by a 3.5-meter-high barbed wire fence, with which its residents were finally cut off from the world around them, recalls "Deutsche Welle".
On October 2, 1940, the Nazi governor of Warsaw Ludwig Fischer signed an order for the creation of an isolated "Jewish residential quarter" in the occupied Polish capital. Soon after, the city with the largest Jewish community in pre-war Europe became the largest ghetto on the Old Continent.
In the fall of 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, a total of 3.5 million Jews lived in the country - about 10% of the entire population. The occupiers confiscated all their property and imprisoned them in 400 ghettos.
Anyone found outside the ghetto without a permit was threatened with death. The Warsaw ghetto was at times inhabited by nearly 450,000 people, confined to an area of just 4 square kilometers.
“Hygiene was catastrophic, typhus and tuberculosis spread unhindered throughout the ghetto. Every morning we saw corpses of deceased people in front of the doors. "They buried them in mass graves," recalls the late literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a Holocaust survivor. For the German occupiers, the Jewish quarter was something of a tourist attraction: the Nazi organization KdF (Strength through Joy) organized bus tours of the ghetto.
People there died mainly of starvation. According to the regulations of the Nazi occupiers at the time, Jews in the ghetto received 184 kilocalories per day, while the "norm" for Poles was 634 kilocalories per day, and for Germans - an average of 2,310 kilocalories per day.
Beginning of the mass deportations
The ghettos were conceived by the Nazis as a stopover on the way to the extermination camps. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 set the course for the “final solution of the Jewish question”, after which the Nazis began liquidating the ghettos and sending their inhabitants to the gas chambers.
From July 1942, in just 7 weeks, 300,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw, who were later murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. About 35,000 people remained in the ghetto – mainly young men who were supposed to work for German companies.
A total of twenty-five thousand inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto managed to hide from the authorities before the deportations, most of them joining the resistance.
When SS units invaded the ghetto on April 19, 1943, to deport the last people left there, they were in for a surprise: the ghetto inhabitants put up fierce resistance. A total of 750 insurgents, armed only with pistols and hand grenades, managed to hold off nearly two thousand heavily armed German soldiers, SS units and police for three weeks. But in the end, the insurgents were defeated. On May 16, 1943, the Germans demolished the Great Synagogue, and SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stropp wrote in his report that there was no longer a Jewish quarter in Warsaw.